The Treaty of Canandaigua, November 11, 1794

As we've seen in early posts, raids such as that by General John Sullivan had pushed most of the Iroquois Six Nations peoples from their hunting ranges and farmland in New York.  After the war, the state of New York and land speculators had sought to capitalize on this vacuum by negotiating peace meal treaties with the tribes, something the federal government was keen to stop.  Some of these agreements were leases, others were in the form of treaties, but none were legal and many were patently unfair.  Afraid that the Six Nations would join the Ohio tribes and prolong the Northwest Indian War (1785-1794), the Washington Administration stepped in.

Washington sent Timothy Pickering, who was Postmaster General at the time, as his agent to treat with the Six Nations for their property in New York.  Pickering invited the Iroquois Council to a meeting at Canandaigua, New York.  The Treaty established peace and friendship between the Iroquois Nations and affirmed the boundaries of an earlier land purchase from Massachusetts to New York known as the Phelps-Gorham Purchase, which involved land claimed by the Seneca.  It also set the boundaries of a large Seneca reservation in New York and provided for an annuity and annual allotments of Calico cloth to the tribes as repayment for the land they stood to lose under the Treaty.  These cloth allotments give the Treaty its nickname of the Calico Treaty.  It remains one of the governing documents between the Six Nations and the federal government, who still provides an annuity and, at least until recently, cloth allotments.   However, in 1960, the state of New York took eminent domain of thousands of acres of Iroquois land as a draining area for the Kinzua Dam, displacing several families.

Among the signatories for the Iroquois were Cornplanter, Handsome Lake, Little Beard and Red Jacket, all of whom we've run across in other posts.